Can your MMO really be an RPG?

I've recently rediscovered Oblivion on my Xbox 360.

Over the past few years I've spent some time playing a number of MMOs, and the experience varies somewhat between one and the next but consistently, they don't contain much roleplay.

This doesn't seem initially to be a critical aspect but it does hilight fundamental difference: MMOs seem to take a role more akin to team sports / social environment for the people that I know who play them ... kind of like an online pub, with orc slaying / raid dungeons thrown in. People play as themselves, disassociated from the characters that they play and with the advent of VOIP communications chatting as they do so.

This is no bad thing, the ability to socialise freely in an online environment, but it does show the marked difference between the MMO experience and the traditional RPG experince, where suspension of disbelief is maintained, and the players immersion in the story seems to be greater.

My open question about this: is it can you actually have an MMORPG that includes immersive roleplay, or is it the very nature of people that they bring their lives with them into the game and dilute the narrative?

WoW, Celebrity Sponsorship and being the ipod of the MMO world

I've moaned about WoW and it's stifling effect on the MMO genre. It strikes me that we are seeing the new ipod of the mmo world here. How many of the competitors for either product run TV advertising (let alone use celebrity endorsement when doing so - WoW and Ozzy Osbourne being the most recent).

The simple fact is that with this scale of product, with this level of marketing behind it, with this size of established user-base, how can the next big thing get its message through and survive in the face of the inevitable WoW2, in the same way that I doubt there will be a serious contender for the ipod for quite some time (or until Apple messes up)?

Vollee Beta Mini Review

Vollee (http://www.vollee.com) offer something entirely unexpected: Second Life via your 3G mobile phone. Sound impossible? Well, actually, no.

Vollee take the innovative approach of remoting all the processing of the Second Life client and the 3D rendering of the image itself, by running this as a shart on a remote server. What the Vollee client does is recieve a video stream of the resulting image, and map your control responses back to the remote server.

Sounds like a complex solution? Maybe. Does it work? Absolutely! I have to say, having shown this technology to a number of colleagues, this is a bround-breaking solution to providing a real answer to hi-fidelity content on mobile devices: process it elsewhere and stream the resulting display.

I have to add that I am using the Nokia E61 version of the software on my Nokia E71, and it's working fine, if a little sluggish and not supporting the phone's WiFi connection (only working with the 3G internet).

So please hurry up with an E71 version, Vollee!

Vollee mention in their press content on their website that they are interested in using this as a technology to allow access to any persistent-world type game from your mobilephone ... so this could be a future where you can play WoW on your mobile.

Now, what would be really interesting is to see if anyone gets ahead of this by launching a VNC client for PC and Mobile Phone that allows you to do this using any application of your choice and manages the image resizing (or even a panning virtual desktop) for you and maps your controls appropriately....

The Curse of WoW

I was just nosing through one of the MMO news feeds. It's a dire state if you ask me. It's either WoW or nothing. There seem to be so many MMOs failing at the moment and the feedback seems to fall into two categories, either a) why play this when WoW is so much better, or b) this is just copying WoW, so we might as well just play WoW. Sheesh. Time for something new please!

The narrative of now

Whilst a colleague and I spent 3 hours on a tube journey to and from a client meeting that never was (that's a whole other story on why you should virtualise project meetings...), we got into a discussion about car based games, and specifically about licensed vehicles.

It's fairly standard practice that if you make a car based computer or console game, and want to use a real-world car you must pay a significant (tens of thousands of pounds) licensing cost to be able to reproduce the shape and detail of the car and the brand identity of it and it's maker. This practice is understandable from a brand control point of view – you don't want your car brand associated with a game that's going to give you negative publicity. It's common practice for the can manufacturers to insist that no damage is shown on their vehicles, regardless of how they are driven , so that they always appear in pristine showroom condition.

A side effect of this is that it effectively shuts the smaller developers out of a this sector of the market for one simple reason: games that don't have licensed real-world cars just don't sell anywhere near as well. There are a few notable examples of this, the Burnout series being one.
This led the conversation to the obvious next question: Why does it matter is the cars are copies of real world ones?

My opinion is that society and the media does a very successful job of fostering materialistic desire for unobtainable things in most people. For example, I would dearly love to own a Ford GT. I know this will never happen – they only made a hand-full of them and even if I did have the money, I know there is a long list of more rational and immediate things that the money would be spent on.

As I've mentioned, I play games. One of them being Test Drive Unlimited by Atari. It's a driving game with some really unique elements, but the relevant fact it that one of the cars that a player can save hard-won in-game cash for is the Ford GT. When I eventually had enough cash I bought the car and it was a great pleasure to own and drive.

The question again is: Why?

My theory is that this all comes back to something that is innate to all of us, since a large amount of our communication is based upon it: stories.

From the way I describe to you now, what happened on the tube train yesterday, to how I might explain the fall of the Roman Empire or how an alpha channel on the surface of a nerve cell contributes to that nerve firing, each is encapsulated in its own story, described from the 3rd person.

This brings me to immersion and player emotional investment in games and social environments like Second Life. I'm invested in my virtual Ford GT, on it's virtual island of Hawaii. I worked hard to earn the cash, it's a wonderful design and it out performs a lot of the other virtual cars in it's class. It satisfies the desire for the unobtainable, and is a significant milestone on the story of my experience in an environment that, lets face it, isn't real. But I do have to say when talking to someone who plays the same game, the discussion about what's in our virtual garages is exactly the same as if everything where real. We project ourselves into the virtual, willingly adopting the parts we play in the game, comparing our progress, our status in an imaginary world.
I find it very interesting how easily people settle into a text based social environment. Just looking round at the people I see working, tools like Skype have gone from being relatively rare a couple of years ago to be on the majority of desktops now. Then there's SMS.

When conversing in these types of environments, we begin to insert narrative elements where they are missing to complete the experience. LOL is a prefect example. I may have laughed out loud, or just thought it, but in the shared narrative of the conversation, from your point of view, I laughed. This evolved from early text chat users adding in descriptive elements to replace the missing visual and tonal cues about their emotional state whilst chatting. These then where reduced to acronyms for ease of typing.

This becomes more apparent in visually represented worlds like Second Life or MMORPG games like World of Warcraft. People having conversations in it find that the conversation becomes more and more embellished with narrative detail, echoed by the animated gestures of the avatars. This isn't just the stuff to provide the missing social cues, but additional narrative. This all leads towards better immersion, more emotional investment, a better conversation and the people in that conversation retaining more of it for longer.

These are the stories of now. Narratives communally written about what is being discussed right now. Adapting to changes of focus and projecting the emotional state of the co-authors.

I think that these stories exist and work because they are presented in textual form. The medium naturally encourages the reader to use their imagination as they read each line. But here comes VOIP – Voice over IP ... a relatively new technology being deployed to allow users to chat using microphone and speakers to hear the voices of the people they are conversing with.
This has two effects. Firstly, making it harder to break the bond with reality and become immersed in the world with which you art interacting (finding out that the eight foot tall Orc you have been adventuring with has the voice of a twelve year old American kid, doesn't help the suspension of disbelief). Secondly it adds back in all the social cues that have been missing in the typed conversations, making for a more genuine social experience.

There are other considerations in this that I won't explore here ... one is the ability of people using text based chat to hold a number of parallel conversations, often with a number of people in each conversation. The fact that the communication is typed text allows this to happen. I also read a something on a blog recently that was saying that people using a virtual environment like Second Life, and VOIP so that they could hear each other talking, found that they got a better sense of being somewhere together than using web cams with VOIP to have a video conference.

Text chat will I think continue for quite some time alongside technologies like VOIP – it offers too many features that are not available with spoken communication. Just as it suffers from the things that are missing, but I think we are very good at finding ways to fill the gaps and immerse ourselves in the virtual environments we use.

Pale